“O Allah, conceal my death from them (1) so that human beings may know that the jinn do not know the unseen.”

He then fashioned the tree into a staff on which he would lean. A termite gnawed through it, so the staff gave way and he toppled. They estimated how long the termite had been eating and discovered it had been a full year. Thus people realized that, had the jinn possessed knowledge of the unseen, they would not have remained in degrading toil (2)—and Ibn ʿAbbas used to recite the verse exactly in that form. The jinn, grateful to the termite, would thereafter bring it water wherever it happened to be (3).

I read this report to Ishaq ibn Abi Bakr; he told us, “Yusuf ibn Khalil informed us; Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Taymi informed us; Abu ʿAli al-Haddad informed us; Abu Nuʿaym narrated to us; Sulayman ibn Ahmad narrated to us; ʿAli ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAziz narrated to us; Abu Hudhayfah Musa ibn Masʿud narrated to us; Ibrahim ibn Tahman narrated it.”

Its chain of transmission is hasan (good).

Yahya ibn Ahmad al-Judhami and Muhammad ibn Husayn al-Fuwi informed us, saying: “Muhammad ibn ʿImad informed us; ʿAbd Allah ibn Rifaʿah informed us; Abu al-Hasan al-Khilaʿi informed us; Shuʿayb ibn ʿAbd al-Minhal narrated to us; Ahmad ibn al-Hasan ibn Ishaq al-Razi narrated to us; Abu al-Zinbaʿ Rawh ibn al-Faraj narrated to us; ʿAmr ibn Khalid narrated to us; ʿUbayd Allah ibn ʿAmr narrated to us, from ʿAbd al-Karim ibn Malik al-Jazari, from Saʿid ibn Jubayr, from Ibn ʿAbbas, who reported that the Prophet ﷺ said:

“There will appear, at the end of time, a people who dye (their hair) with this black substance, like the crops of pigeons; they will not even catch the scent of Paradise.” (4)

This is a fair (hasan), singular (gharib) hadith. It was also recorded by Abu Dawud and al-Nasa’i through the transmission of ʿAbd Allah al-Raqqi.